Support surfaces are commonly used for roadways, remote jobsites, industrial staging areas, spill containment areas and/or other purposes in an ever-increasing myriad of industries, such as construction, military, energy (e.g. pipeline, oilfield, etc.), mining, chemical, transportation, disaster response, utilities and entertainment. The support surfaces are often formed with multiple, releasably interconnectable components, such as ground covers. For example, many versions of support surfaces involve the use of removable connectors (sometimes called attachment, or locking, pins), inserted into aligned holes formed in the respective interconnectable components to connect them together. Frequently, a large quantity (e.g. dozens) of attachment pins are used in a support surface having multiple interconnected components.
In many instances, the ground covers and related components may be heavy duty, used in heavy weight-bearing scenarios (e.g. supporting the weight and movement of tracked and/or wheeled vehicles and heavy equipment), subject to any among a variety of stresses and/or outdoor weather conditions (e.g. hot, wet, cold or freezing climates, uneven underling ground surfaces), or a combination thereof. When attachment pins are utilized, one or more of these factors, the shear quantity of attachment pins needed in a particular situation and/or other variables may impact the effectiveness and efficiency of manipulating (e.g. locking, unlocking, extracting or a combination thereof) the attachment pins. For example, in some scenarios, substantial torque or effort may be required to secure the attachment pins into or out of engagement with the support surface (e.g. due to uneven underlying surfaces, warping, imperfect, uneven or differing geometries of connected components, misaligned attachment pin holes, freezing weather conditions, frozen, iced-over, jammed, damaged or deformed attachment pins, etc.).
Various presently known existing tools and techniques for manipulating attachment pins may be difficult to use or implement, ineffective, inefficient, time-consuming, require manually-generated torque and/or operator bending, or a combination thereof. For other examples, various prior art tools and techniques are not fully or nearly fully automated, easy to maintain, largely or entirely self-lubricating, reliable, useful in severe weather conditions and circumstances, easily used for both locking and unlocking attachment pins with minimal tool reconfiguration, capable of extracting attachments pins from ground covers or a combination thereof.
It should be understood that the above-described examples, disadvantages, features and capabilities are provided for illustrative purposes only and are not intended to limit the scope or subject matter of this disclosure or the appended claims. Thus, none of the appended claims should be limited by the above discussion or construed to address, include or exclude each or any of the above-cited examples, disadvantages, features and capabilities merely because of the mention thereof herein.
Accordingly, there exists a need for improved systems, articles and methods useful for manipulating ground cover attachment pins having one or more of the attributes or capabilities described or shown in, or as may be apparent from, the various parts of this patent.